


on your side

by thir13enth



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 21:01:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14679435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thir13enth/pseuds/thir13enth
Summary: I’m sorry for everything I’ve done and everything I didn’t do.





	on your side

In all his lived thousands of years, Lotor still never would have predicted he would find himself aboard the Castle of Lions — eating dinner with Earthlings, cracking jokes with proclaimed enemies to Galrans, helping aliens outside of his species fulfill their goals and relying on them to overcome his own obstacles to achievement — but here he is, sleeping under the same roof and eating over the same table as the Voltron Paladins and its Altean engineers.

Sometimes, thinking about the irony of his fate, Lotor gets lost in his thoughts, and he often regrets it because his self-reflection is distracting at the most inconvenient moments.

Like now: as he’s sparring against the princess in the training room. She immediately senses his inattentiveness, and then takes the opportunity to flip him onto his back. As he falls hard to the floor with a hard thud, she steps lightly on his chest with her foot to declare victory.

“Win,” she announces, a satisfied smile on her face. She stretches her hand out to help him up.

He shakes himself out of his head. He blinks once, still a little stunned, and then takes her hand. He doesn’t even have to exert any effort to stand; her strength alone is able to pick him completely up. He’s seen it at firsthand many times by now, in observing Allura, but Altean strength continues to fascinate him. He towers over her by at least a head, but her power is almost equivalent to that of a Galran about three units taller than Lotor.

“Strangely, I think my Galran roots have done me a disadvantage when it comes to physical strength,” Lotor replies.

She waves the comment off. “Don’t blame your genetics. There’s more to the fight than the muscle,” she reminds him. She crosses her arms. “And honestly, you’re not bad at all — I haven’t been this hard worked-out since training with the guards.”

He laughs once. “So am I hired?” he teases, fixing his sleeves and readying himself for another round.

She doesn’t respond with a quick retort as she usually does, and surprised to not be blasted with another curt insult, he looks over in her direction, only to see her staring up at the stars.

He’s never seen this expression on her before — wistful and reflective, maybe a little reminiscent — but he knows exactly what she’s thinking about. She looks so vulnerable, and he doesn’t have it in him to open old wounds, but he also knows that he’ll never come to closure if he avoids the scars between his people and her past.

“What do you miss most about Altea?”

She’s quiet, so he thinks he’s made a mistake, but then she smiles, still staring up at the constellations.

“Many things,” she finally says. “I can’t really pick one.” She breathes in deeply, closing her eyes momentarily. “I miss the food, the language, the sunsets… the people.” She pauses for a moment, her eyes opening again. “I miss my friends. I miss my family.”

He thinks he hears a crack in her voice, and it hurts him to hear it as much as he thinks it hurts for her to say it.

He opens and closes his mouth, in a number of attempts to find the best words for an apology, but in the end, he can only think of:

“I’m sorry.”

This pulls her out of her memories. “What are you talking about?”

“For your loss,” he replies.

“Oh,” she says, looking down at the floor. “Oh, no, you don’t have to apologize. You asked me what I missed most, and I was just remembering. I’m quite alright. I’m no longer grieving as I used to before. I’m at peace.”

He shakes his head. “No, no,” Lotor clarifies. “I’m sorry because I caused this. My people caused your suffering.”

Allura looks at him with pained eyes, furrowed brows. “You don’t have to apologize for what your people did.”

“Actually, I do,” Lotor replies. “My family was on the throne, and I have to take responsibility for that. That was in my power. That was something I could have—”

She reaches out and puts her hand over one of his, effectively interrupting him. “Stop,” she tells him. She sighs, folding his hand between hers. “That is not your fault. I don’t care if your family was on the throne. You weren’t the person that declared war. You weren’t the person that commanded Altea be destroyed.” She looks at him, but he doesn’t let her meet his eyes. “You didn’t have a voice either,” she reminds him. “Your father shunned you. Your people didn’t accept you.”

He frowns. This is wrong. The victim should never be comforting the perpetrator.

“My status as prince still meant something,” he tells her. “And I could have done so much more. But I was naïve, and I didn’t think about the consequences of what my people would do. I was selfish, and I was concerned more about myself and my right to the throne. I was too busy hating my father and just let my people commit these atrocities. I should have known better.”

Quietly, he adds, “I should have done better.”

And it’s this thought that always brings him back to the maze within his head — at the heart of it all, whenever he thinks about his fate and how he got here, this is what he dwells on. How does he repent? How can he possibly redeem himself? Was it even conceivable that he could do such a thing? For as long as he serves her, for as much as he gives her, for as much as he —

“Lotor,” she says softly.

And the questions in his head seize.

Her voice — no matter how deep his thoughts — somehow always has the power to bring him immediately to the surface.

“You _are_ doing better,” she tells him. “It doesn’t matter what happened in the past. Look how far you’ve come. You’ve far outdone more than what you claim you haven’t.”

He doesn’t believe her, and while he doesn’t say it, his body language states just as much. This, she catches on.

“You _did_ know better than your father,” she continues. “You knew things were wrong with your father in power, and you bravely left your planet — everything you knew and everything you hard — and you formed your own fighting force, your own allies, and you sought the truth of the universe. And then after all of this, you even had the tenacity to prove your entire planet wrong when you came back for the Kral Zera and easily reclaimed the throne. You did more than your people ever thought you would, and you’re becoming the greatest, most benevolent leader of the Galrans.”

“You’re giving me far too much credit, Princess.”

“I mean it,” she tells him, squeezing his hands tight and looking up at him. “You’ve literally changed the course of the universe. You’ve done so much good.”

 _Good_ , she said.

Good.

He replays this word in his mind. He’s never thought of himself as good. And maybe that’s because the word is foreign to him, or perhaps it’s because that’s not at all how he sees himself.

Who is he? The half-blooded progeny of the most feared Galran conqueror in all the universe for the past tens of thousands of centuries. The son so weak, he couldn’t even handle a punch of criticism from his father and looked to only his most loyal supporters for affirmation. The son so irresponsible, he fled the responsibilities of the throne and sought the lower ambitions from his crazed mother’s dreams. The son so insecure, he only later discovered his sole safe place was with his own people and returned begging for forgiveness with his tail tucked between his legs.

But good? This, for all his lived thousands of years, he has never heard.

But if good is being at Allura’s side, he thinks that perhaps this is what he wants to be.


End file.
